America's alternative newsweeklies -- among the healthiest branch of the print media -- have grown increasingly out of touch with the grassroots cultures that birthed them. What they need to do is take a cue from the optimism and curiosity about "the other" exemplified by their own sex ads. Commentator Sandy Close is executive editor of Pacific News Service.

SALT LAKE CITY -- On my way to Salt Lake City last week to address a convention of alternative newsweeklies, I spent the two hour plane ride sampling these one-time renegades of American media.

As a journalist long associated with the alternative press, what struck me was their (read our) overriding preoccupation with the public realm -- politics, corporate America, the civic culture -- and our sense that the best way to attain social change is to keep things the same. As our political nemeses, the so-called right, get sweatier, harder, meaner, we "progressives," as we like to call ourselves, retreat into platitudes. "They" want to flog the kid in the bedroom, lock up three strikers for life, execute 14-year-olds. We pontificate about how "It takes a village..."

Worse, there's a predictable -- even defensive -- tone to how we cover grassroots America -- what we used to think of as the underground or counter-culture. The old optimism is gone, replaced by grim visions of an America increasingly threatened by race wars, the rise of the Christian Right and angry white males nursing their grievances. It's as if we've lost our zest for life, our appetite for the outrageous.

Bored by the pieties, I flipped to the back of the newsweeklies and started reading the sex ads. Here at last I rediscovered what the alternatives once knew -- subversion always comes from below. Old Max Scheer, whose Berkeley Barb was The Mother of all Alternatives, would chuckle in his grave at the idea -- but the most alternative thing about alternative papers these days is their sex ads.

Consider this:

* While the front of the book invariably depicts a country polarized by racial tensions, the back of the book sizzles with an array of intimate fantasies, a curiosity about "the other", that transgress every border. (Indeed, an entire section is devoted to "Anything Goes/Variations.) My favorite was the one from the Pacific Northwest Inlander (the heart of skinhead and militia territory): "Irish/Polynesian Male, honest, short, fat, ugly, divorced, 39, seeks attractive, monogamous female soul mate, any race."

* The front of the book warns ominously of a religious revival in America as if it might put women back into Mother Hubbards. Tell that, I thought, to the "cruel but loving and beautiful SFDDFMS (who) demands legions of slaves" in the Austin Chronicle. What Ralph Reed may not realize -- but SFDDFMS clearly does -- is that once you take the genie of sexual liberation out of the bottle, there's no way to bottle it up again.

* Finally, while the front of the book focuses on the white male backlash against feminism and all the other good things wrought by '60s activists, the back of the book illuminates the more profound truth: In a culture which has lost its capacity for intimate life, the angry white male yearns for intimacy. In the heterosexual, homosexual and "anything goes/variations" departments, the number of men seeking women, men seeking men exceeds the number of women seeking men or women seeking women by about three to one.

Then there's the secret code language the writers of the sex ads use to identify themselves -- such as DDF (meaning drug and disease free), NS (non-smoker), MS (marijuana smoker), HWP (height, weight proportional). I even found C, J and I -- for Christian, Jewish and Islamic -- indicating the reassertion of religious preferences in this boundary-crossing arena of love-making.

It occurs to me now that Max Scheer -- eventually disinvited from the Network of Alternative Newsweeklies because of his kookie sex ads -- was more prophetic than he imagined. The alternative weeklies come closer to the ache, the pain, the throb of American culture in the back of the book than in the front of the book.

The danger for the alternatives is that -- increasingly fearful of where the cultural energies of the country are moving -- we will forget to read our own sex ads, much less take our political cues from them.